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"[My relationships were] like I was in these movies where the script was only half-written. When I’d get to the end of this half-script, the other actors wanted me to ad lib. But I had never gotten the hang of that. That’s why these movies were always box-office failures. Six of them in the past twenty years. I always blew the lines." ~ from my horrible first novel "Learn How To Pretend." (unpublished)(obviously)

Monday, December 31, 2012

The following is from Lynn Johnson's eponymous blog (lynnjohnson.org). It's pretty brilliant and I highly recommend it. Sorry, Lynn for not getting permission to repost here first.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Repeat after me:“In 2013, I resolve to love all the children of the world as if they are my own children.”There you go. You now have the only New Year’s Resolution you need. You’re welcome.When you look at a list of popular American New Year’s resolutions,
I am sure you can relate to them. Most of them have been on my list at
least once. And, the resolution I am offering you is not meant to
replace any of these. It’s meant to re-frame them. Let me ask you: Why do
we want to get fit and drink less and finally get our messy finances in
order? Too often, we make these resolutions for the reason - I am not a good enough person and this is the year when I will finally be a good person. This
is a sucky reason. Plus, it’s not true. You are already good enough.
I am already good enough. And, as individuals, we are all doing the
best we can.What we are lacking is a connection to each other. A collective
sense of responsibility to each other. And I argue that this lacking is
making us feel much worse than the fact that we could recycle more than
we do or that we haven’t yet quit smoking. In fact, I argue that it is
BECAUSE of this lacking that we are doing much of these “bad behaviors”
in the first place. We eat and drink and smoke and sit around in front
of the TV for too many hours in the first place because we are
sad and scared and having a hard time navigating this world that tells
us we are not good enough. We do these things because it is so
difficult to find ways to come and be and work and play together.
Although personal resolve and self control are important, I argue that
it is in our coming together that we will find our true strength.

So, here is the re-framing. Whether you are actually a parent or
not, when you resolve to love all the children of the world as if they
are your own children, you create and renovate connections to others in
real, deep, and meaningful ways. Your resolutions start to develop a
greater purpose because they are aligned with this greater mission –
this mission to make choices based on the love and collective
responsibility we all have to care for the most precious and vulnerable
among us. Suddenly, “Get a better job” becomes “Use my talents to make a positive contribution to this society.” ”Manage Stress” becomes “Practice mindfulness to be conscious of the quality of energy I bring into any situation.” And “Lose Weight” becomes “Be the model of healthy eating and physical activity that I wish for the children I love.”

The one thing we all have in common is that we have all been
children. We all understand what children need to be happy and to be
cared for. Unfortunately, many of us did not receive what we needed as
children. And I am so sorry about that. But, as adults, no matter what
happened to us as children, we can make the choice to take
responsibility for the children who are coming up after us. Let’s face
it. We have survived the end of the world.
Now, it’s time to re-build it. You are already a good enough person.
You just need the rest of us to have your back. You can do it. I can
do it. Let’s do it for our children.

'Occupied Cascadia' is a documentary film
exploring the emerging concept of bioregionalism throughout the Pacific
Northwest. Cascadia is best defined by the rhythms that encompass this
life-place and is located on the northeast Pacific Rim. Historically,
the diverse voices throughout this land have paved the way for many
social movements.

With resource wars upon us, governments are more oppressive than
ever, global economies are destabilizing, corporations and media are
continually dividing us and most seem to have some notion of an imminent
collapse on the horizon. Are the people of this region forging a new
path?

We feel we have captured the essence of an emerging culture and
movement. It also appears that this type of movement is bridging the
gap away from fundamentalism towards our commonalities. What changes
must we really make in order to provide for future generations,
including the natural world? Explore these concepts and more.

This film was Co-directed and Co-produced by Devin Hess and Mel
Sweet, self-taught photographers now transitioning to independent film
making.

Just write it, she said just write it down write down the
bones and so I have to do just that and not think about it. It’s a Zen thing,
she said, a practice so to speak. But I’m not seeing the key us there is just
words spilling out that are not spelled right and this means I’ am thinking too
much about it.

What is the fear? What is the state? On one hand I’m being
asked to become a revolutionary and on the other I’m called to resist falling
in the trap of nationhood and citizenry. To which should I respond? Both are
valid paths I think. And so I shell
prepare for both prepare for revolution with wisdom and compassion and love and
HEALTH!! I shall study and tune and tone and prepare. I wonder what Zizek’s
book has to say about it all? Of course he is a communist, so that will color
his thoughts. Rall’s book is fascinating. And here I sit writing. I wonder what
my dad would say dad out it all? What so what the fuck do I say to Rita? Who
the hell knows? I’m tired of anger and it seems the path of revolutionary that
is being requested is not one of happiness and compassion. Rall notes it will
take years for change to happen. Maybe even a century. So to what end so we
fight? To what end so I as a Canadian push against this system here first I
must lean control.

"If I go inward enough – beyond my manifestations,
beneath my need to be right, first, perfect, and desired—I may one day
get a taste of who I really am. When I can begin to see a truer quality
of my own being, I can then understand my real place in the world. I can
start to understand the meaning and purpose of my existence. Why am I
here? What is my dharma? In this way I hope to conquer death, but not by
way of my petty self-interested concerns. In fact, such pettiness will
hasten the death of my real self. I must work arduously to build a
bridge between my inner and outer worlds in order to make a mark upon
the world that will in some small way contribute to the prevalence of a
more compassionate world for the generations that follow. It is in this
way I hope to know eternal life."

“Each man had only one genuine vocation – to find the way to
himself…. His task was to discover his own destiny – not an arbitrary
one – and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself.
Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a
flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one’s
own inwardness.”

A wonderful thought for the day, the season, and for the coming year from Tracy Cochrane's blog. I've stolen the entire thing, so please visit Tracey's blog often and help eliminate my bad karma :~)

Up before dawn on Christmas Eve, writing this by a lighted Christmas
tree, I marvel at the expectant hush in the air. I still feel that
something miraculous and unexpected is coming, and it has nothing to do
with the presents under the tree. Conditioned since babyhood to expect
wonders on Christmas—and presents, special baked goods, and a wonderful
suspension of the usual rules and that adult state of distraction, that
buzzing busyness and keeping things rolling—I still sense that
something miraculous is coming. I sense that we are meant to glimpse,
to touch, to receive something beyond conditioning, beyond our common
capacity for delusion, for making hologram worlds in our minds.
There is something beyond us waiting to be received by us. We have
been seeking it all our lives, and it is right here, right now, hovering
above us, surrounding us, in the depths of us. I call it Christmas
presence. Besides our own capacity for distraction—not just by the
sounds or the siren call of the screens in our lives but by hope of
praise and fear of blame and the spin-off worries and ways we get worked
up in this world—we inherit an ability to touch and listen and see and
yearn for what is beyond this self-enclosed world. Along with a body
and brain that passed to us from distant ancestors who noted the darkest
day of the year and then the return of the sun, came the capacity to be
still, to keep watch.
We can think of presence in a very down-to-earth way. It is the way
we are when we walk in the woods, alert, open to our surroundings,
responsive to what might arise. “Sati,” the Pali word for mindfulness
literally means to remember. In a state of open, responsive
attentiveness, we are re-membered or re-collected, heart and body and
mind all present—think of the shepherds keeping watch in the fields.
Presence is also something very exalted, something that comes in great
stillness (since I’ve brought up the shepherds, I may as well add that
“Silent Night” has a coded meaning for me). Presence is a great force
of love, a light of awareness that reaches down to us—reminding us know
that we are remembered in a much vaster world than our brain-sized
world, assuring us that as improbable it sounds, we are meant to be part
of a greater whole.
Presence also has a quality of forgiveness, an open, responsive,
loving acceptance that delivers us from the cruelty of our own
judgments, resentments, guilt, all that is unresolved in our lives–and
we humans all carry such things, and to be cut off from a sense of being
part of a greater, moving whole is to be haunted by the sense that we
aren’t really fully living the life we are meant to be living (not that
we don’t have bright spots, cherished memories).
A wonderful thing about presence is that it can be practiced right
now in the down-to-earth form—and even (especially) if you don’t feel at
all wonderful. We can practice giving open, responsive attention—and
heaven knows what we may receive. Think of those shepherds keeping watch
in the field. Think of them being mindful, open to the unexpected that
might arise, ready to respond to anything that might threaten the
flock. And then came the unexpected….

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Prayer
means we're invited out of the metallic self-obsessed isolation, which
is hell, into the warmth of union, of Goodness, of vitality, and
playfulness, and I'm like, "Look, can I get back to You on this?"

Left to my own devices, I love my obsessive isolation. I get a
lot more done. But luckily I am not left to my own devices. i have
you, in the Martin Buber sense of the word "you"--Thou.
The sacred other. You start throwing a bunch of messy love moments
from friends and loving goofball strangers into my day, and the whole
system threatens to collapse. All of a sudden, I go from the trance of
Forward Thrust, wearing the armor of busyness and achievement and
stature, to finding myself on the floor with Jax's fiancee, making
play-doh spagetti. Or settling in with some very old photos of my
family, when here I set out to organize the garage. Or wanting to call a
man I fired six months ago, who had put in a new tile floor but jacked
up the price, and inviting him to christmas breakfast in 6 days with my
beloved riff-raff.

He used to BE beloved riff-raff. Then
he crossed me. And now I had a hard dead spot in my heart, and today I
think I might just postpone decorating the Christmas tree--creating
light in these cold dark days of Advent and Newtown--until after I clean
up the mess in my heart where I harbor resentment. God has helped me
miss him.

Someone once famously said that holding onto resentment is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.

So that is my new, revised, not-left-to-my-own-devices plan for the
day. It will make me WAY more vulnerable than I had planned. But I
know it is what God would want if She were standing right here in her
best hat, like our oldest church ladies. She would say, "Oh, tiny
princess. Stop being such a big whiny baby. Forgive Joel. ask that he
forgive you. You are both here for giveness. For the purpose of
giveness. Get a grip, Hon."

What if my contribution to
peace in this shattered scary sad world was to do this brave holy thing
today? I am pretty sure this earth is secretly Forgiveness School. We
ask purselves, Would you rather be right, or happy? If we want to be
happy, we have to forgive, one person at a time. But then we get to
feel the Light again, a lightness; and practice radical playfulness in
the face of tragedy. so that is what I'll do: forgive Joel, ask for
forgiveness from him, and then (worst of all) forgive myself for being
such as asshat. Then I'll decorate the tree, add light to this joint!
and then, and only then, I'll get on the floor for the sacrament of
play-doh spaghetti.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

I love this cartoon. I mean I love XKCD overall and I get most of the strips. But this particular one really got to me. It's not really funny in the way, say, that the "My Hobby" ones are. It's one of those, funny because it's true things. You don't write a strip like this one unless you feel that way. You don't just make up those feelings.

I don't know. Maybe most people aren't really like that, feeling confused and scared and like they are trying really hard all the time. But I am. And from this strip, I'm guessing I'm not the only one.

I guess the real humor in this comes in the punch-line, "Too honest." Like the "TMI" we get when sharing the details of, for instance, bodily functions, the sharing of how we are really feeling -- the sharing of honesty -- is akin to public indecency. To bare the shitty state of our souls is like dropping trou in the middle of an intersection or, some might..... yeah.... there was a three hour pause inbetween begining that sentence and the ellipsis. No clue where I was going.

This essay excerpt comes from Tracy Cochrane who is, among other things, executive editor at Parabola magazine. Please check out the full story on her website.

We tend to see ourselves as fixed, static, small, but deep down we
know that we are not at all fixed but made of energy that is in
movement, tethered to a greater truth, a much greater whole, drawing it
down to us. We realize this in love and in loss—the invisible presence
of a loved one painfully apparent in absence. We marvel at the size and
quality of this energy field (it’s hard to know what to call it). An
enormous hole looms open in the atmosphere, much larger and more
indescribable than the physical person we knew. I have sensed this
since last Thursday, when my 93-year-old father, Paul Cochran, died
peacefully. And Friday, when in a nearby town so many small and
innocent children died violently, along with the brave educators who
died trying to save them.

On Sunday, my local mediation group sat in a circle and shared
stories of loss and grief and the compassion that followed (or didn’t
follow). We all had wisdom to share. A friend remembered being asked if
her old mother’s death was sudden. “Yes, it was: one moment she was
alive and the next she was dead.” One minute she was in the seemingly
manageable world of the known, the next moment she slipped into the
unknown. One moment life seems manageable, even routine. The next
moment we are surrounded by mystery.And sometimes what we must confront is incomprehensible. Another
friend in our circle told us he worked with several parents who had
children in that school in Newtown. Breaking down in sobs, he told us
he knew a mother who lost a little boy. “It seems so senseless, “he
said. “What do you say? The best I could think of is that millions of
people are reaching out to you with compassion now.”

Monday, December 17, 2012

Sunday, December 16, 2012

"There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life."

I came across this 37 year-old quote yesterday. It couldn't be more timely. Writing in 1976, social psychologist Erich Fromm wrote that:

The need for profound human change emerges not only as an ethical or
religious demand, not only as a psychological demand arising from the
pathogenic nature of our present social character, but also as a
condition for the sheer survival of the human race. Right
living is no longer only the fulfillment of an ethical or religious
demand. For the first time in history the physical survival of the human
race depends on a radical change of the human heart. However, a change
of the human heart is possible only to the extent that drastic economic
and social changes occur that give the human heart the chance for change
and the courage and vision to achieve it.

"Believe me: It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.

The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you?Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that?There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.May each go his own way.I will be no savior, no lawgiver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children.Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways.Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous.Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it.Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way.The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty."

It's been so easy to tell them how beautiful THEY are, because it's
obvious. They are the thing beauty is made of. They are the reason we
started worshiping beauty. They are milky and porcelain with dark eyes
that see right through you. They sparkle and dance. When they're
sleeping, they turn into soft cloud babies, little perfect tufts of
white on the moonlight.

There are a lot of people like me. Women who know things. Women who
have seen things. Women with diseases in their livers. There are a lot
of women with scars on their arms and words that carry themselves like
sparrows. There are women who were too big for this town, who had their
backs bent carrying things like religion and a history that originated
somewhere in the crook of a branch that extended over a stream. A place
where a patch of the sky was visible through the leaves, where a little
girl let her bare leg dangle too far down.

There are a lot of people like me, because we're all the same. We're
all blood and electricity. We're lonely under the gaze of god. We're
all wet with dew and swallowing hard against DO THIS, CONSUME, SHUT UP
and BE AFRAID to die.

All of you women with lines on your brow, with cracks between your
fingers... it's been a long winter. All of you, you are beautiful and
so am I.

The thing is, my children are perfect. I am the grown up, so I'm
supposed to show them everything about life. When they wake up in the
morning, though, I stare at them and they're new. They teach me
everything. They are babies and they teach me what it means to be a
person. It's easy to see that they're beautiful.

I am slow and I am tired. I am round and sagging. I am harried. I am sexless. I am getting older.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

This is from a fantastic book. Wonderfully poetic and insightful. Nice bite-sized book of days type entries. My yoga teacher reads from this during Shavasana. You can click the link just below and go straight to Amazon, or you can help me by going through the Amazon link on the side of the page.

When We Speak

I have only now realized that something endless has broken
ground in me, and I have no choice but to live and love until it grows in me
like a tree.

I met an old man at a gathering, and when everyone went on
their way, he leaned into the hushed space between us and talked to me as if we
were trees. Scratching his chin, he said, “We start out thin and green, and
each time the sky grows dark, we think we will break, but the downpour makes us
grow, though never straight, always twisting for the light, and, strangely, the
more we reach above the earth, the deeper something in us fingers its way down,
and it is this – our unseen fingers reaching for the core – that keeps us from
blowing away. Now there is not more running and very little swaying, and up
till now, there have been many languages, though none that could be heard, just
a creak at dawn and a moan at night, and sooner or later, we are brought down.
It doesn’t matter how. We are undone. But stacked we burn, and here the poetry
rises from us, leaving wisdom in the ash.”

Then, he left. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I think
his story had to do with humility and with how all that we experience is really
kindling for when we truly speak. Somehow we grow through all the things that
seem so dark, and with each season, our roots thicken and deepen and spread to
bear our weight of living in the world.

But what is the “being brought down,” the “being undone”?
Perhaps after losing a rib and gaining my life, I can, when set aflame by the moment
at hand, cough up some cinder of what it means to live off truth.

Experience, it seems, wants to burn out of us, and whether
what comes out is intelligent or pretty, the purpose of all fire is to light
and warm. Perhaps as the farmer on the edge of winder must gather wood to make
it to spring, we must gather our experience and set it ablaze to keep our
lifeblood healthy and warm.

I've always like Lewis's analogy here -- and his point. We are too easily pleased.

"We
are half-heartedcreatures, fooling about with drink and sex and
ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who
wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what
is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily
pleased."

~ C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory

"The
habit of exiting, of escaping into thoughts and daydreams is a common
occurrence. In fact, fantasy is where we spend most of our time. The Zen
teacher Charlotte Joko Beck called these flights of fancy "the
substitute life." Of course, we don't have to be meditating for the
mind to wander off to this substitute life. We can be listening to
someone talking and mentally just depart. The person

is
right in front of us, but we're on the beach at Waikiki. The main way
we depart is by keeping up a running internal commentary on what's going
and what we're feeling 'like this, I don't like that, I"m hot, I'm
cold', and so on. In fact, we can become so caught up in this internal
dialogue that the people around us become invisible. An important part
of meditation practice, therefore, is to non-aggressively drop that
ongoing conversation in our head and joyfully come back to the present,
being present in the body, being present in the mind, not envisioning
the future or reliving the past, but, if only briefly, showing up for
this very moment."

(From Pema's book Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change.)

Hakuin, the fiery and intensely dynamic Zen master, was once visited by a samurai warrior. “I want to know about heaven and hell,” said the samurai. “Do they really exist?” he asked Hakuin.

Hakuin looked at the soldier and asked, “Who are you?”

“I am a samurai,” announced the proud warrior.

“Ha!” exclaimed Hakuin. “What makes you think you can understand such
insightful things? You are merely a callous, brutish soldier! Go away
and do not waste my time with your foolish questions,” Hakuin said,
waving his hand to drive away the samurai.

The enraged samurai
couldn’t take Hakuin’s insults. He drew his sword, readied for the
kill, when Hakuin calmly retorted, “This is hell.”

The soldier
was taken aback. His face softened. Humbled by the wisdom of Hakuin, he
put away his sword and bowed before the Zen Master.

Monday, December 10, 2012

It's funny that this seems to be shocking. The people in the "geriatric" category here (over 50) are people who were all smoking pot in their teens. They are the ones who've been fighting for legalization all these years.

“The
War on Men Through the Degradation of Woman” - "How is man to recognize
his full self, his full power through the eye’s of an incomplete woman?
The woman who has been stripped of Goddess recognition and diminished
to a big ass and full breast for physical comfort only. The woman who
has been silenced so she may forget her spiritual essence because her
words stir too much thought outside of the pleasure space. The woman who
has been diminished to covering all that rots inside of her with weaves
and red bottom shoes.

I am sure the men, who restructured our
societies from cultures that honored woman, had no idea of the outcome.
They had no idea that eventually, even men would render themselves
empty and longing for meaning, depth and connection.

There is a
deep sadness when I witness a man that can’t recognize the emptiness he
feels when he objectifies himself as a bank and truly believes he can
buy love with things and status. It is painful to witness the betrayal
when a woman takes him up on that offer.

He doesn’t recognize
that the [creation] of a half woman has contributed to his repressed
anger and frustration of feeling he is not enough. He then may love no
woman or keep many half women as his prize.

He doesn’t
recognize that it’s his submersion in the imbalanced warrior culture,
where violence is the means of getting respect and power, as the reason
he can break the face of the woman who bore him 4 four children.

When woman is lost, so is man. The truth is, woman is the window to a man’s heart and a man’s heart is the gateway to his soul.

Thursday, December 06, 2012

"I was recently told of an African tribe that does the most beautiful thing.

When someone does something hurtful and wrong, they take the person to the center of town, and the entire tribe comes and surrounds him. For two days they’ll tell the man every good thing he has ever done.

The tribe believes that every human being comes into the world as GOOD, each of us desiring safety, love, peace, happiness.

But sometimes in the pursuit of those things people make mistakes. The community sees misdeeds as a cry for help.

They band together for the sake of their fellow man to hold him up, to reconnect him with his true Nature, to remind him who he really is, until he fully remembers the truth from which he'd temporarily been disconnected: "I AM GOOD".

"Self-hatred
is such a sad way to travel on this journey. My wish for everyone is to
find the love within, and believe in yourself. We can never truly love
another without giving ourselves that precious gift first.♥ ♥"~Danielle from Soul on Fire~

"You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a
day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you
don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody,
you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can
simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.
This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that
nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it,
something eventually will happen."

What
is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things,
compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its
home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has
become so strange to me…Talk of mysteries!–Think of our life in
nature,–daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, rocks,
trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common
sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we? —Henry David Thoreau Painting: Claude Monet, The Avenue, 1878. http://tmblr.co/ZjYlFyYcuQg_

This is an excerpt of a fascinating article from the New York Times online Opinion page.Read the complete article here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If irony is the ethos of our age — and it is — then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.

The
hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a
nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban
harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny
shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and
hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and
self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through
several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social
forms, a student of cool. He studies relentlessly, foraging for what has
yet to be found by the mainstream. He is a walking citation; his
clothes refer to much more than themselves. He tries to negotiate the
age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material
things.

He is an easy target for mockery. However, scoffing at the
hipster is only a diluted form of his own affliction. He is merely a
symptom and the most extreme manifestation of ironic living. For many
Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or
Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary
mode with which daily life is dealt. One need only dwell in public
space, virtual or concrete, to see how pervasive this phenomenon has
become. Advertising, politics, fashion, television: almost every
category of contemporary reality exhibits this will to irony.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

My friend, Nicole, posted this on Facebook today. I thought it was quite lovely.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"I
was stricken with the oddest thing today... I went outside and the sky
is as blue as the ocean is wide, the air is crisp, the sun is warm, and I
finally heard the bell of the universe telling me what to do with my
life... and right upside my head was a joy that was so pure and
weightless it left me breathlessly giddy. I shouted down the street to
the neighbor and we both tossed our hands up in the
air to celebrate the beauty of the moment (nope, no joke, we are a
brand of weird folk in the Q). I'm still grinning as I think about it.
If I could bottle this feeling and sip on it for the rest of the year,
well... no. I wouldn't. Because if I had it all the time, it wouldn't
taste nearly as sweet or feel nearly as glorious. I'll treasure it is
what I'll do and hopefully be just as open to hearing the whisper of joy
that seems to constantly ride beside us when we only choose to listen."

Saturday, December 01, 2012

I should clarify what I meant when I said “things will
get better.” I wasn’t just saying it to be nice. What I meant to say is that
“things CAN get better.” You’ve said it for so long, that it is a matter of US
changing, not I+++++ (though that would certainly help.)

In the last few months – especially this last one –
I’ve found long times of overwhelming peace, forgiveness, and non-judgement.
I’m able (most of the time) to look at those around me with compassion and
understanding and forgiveness. I’ve been able to stop myself when undesirable
thoughts and reactions come up and ask myself where they are coming from. Are
they legit? Mostly, they’re not.

Working with Dr. T+++++ has helped. My short
Tour of Duty with AA helped some too. But mostly it’s been a matter of
examining my life, working on my issues and understanding which ones I need to
change, but also which ones are neither good nor bad, but just part of my
personality. It was hard, but it was also an awakening of sort that ended up in
self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, and self-love.

I’m not trying to tell you to “just get better,” or
“Just get over it.” I understand where you are standing and that struggle you
are facing regarding I++++. I’m just saying that it is possible to find peace
amidst your/our situation. You expressed two scenarios: One, that I++++
comes home and destroys the peace in your home. Or Two, that he doesn’t ever
come home, and you feel like shit about it. I think there are two more
scenarios. They are the same as above, but add “and you accept it and forgive
yourself and him,” to the end. I know you don’t like these clever sayings, but
I’ve found that Forgiveness really IS giving up hope in a better past. Like you
said, the change needs to be in us.

In the same way we thought the grief we felt after our
dads died would never end, but did, the same will happen here. Things can get
better and, ultimately, I believe, they will get better.